Imagine you are back in high school — fluorescent lights
humming, hard plastic chairs, a classroom stuffy with hormones and anxiety —
and you have just aced a test. Do you think to yourself, “I guess I got lucky
today”? Or does your internal monologue say, “Damn, I’m good!”?
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Now imagine that you have failed the test. Does the voice inside
you whisper: “Of course. You’re so bad at this.” Or does it say, “Ugh — you
just didn’t study hard enough.”
And which of these responses might brand you as an optimist?
You might think, for example, that the first response —
crediting luck for a good outcome — is a sign of optimism, since it suggests
good times ahead. (After all, you are lucky!) But the belief that a good result
is thanks to elements out of your control actually indicates a pessimistic
outlook.
And while the self-critical response to the bad outcome (you did
not study hard enough) might seem like a downer, it is actually a product of
positive thinking — since it suggests you believe that, if you take a different
approach to future tests, you can expect a better result.
When we talk about optimism, it is often easy to oversimplify it
as having a relentlessly upbeat outlook. Optimists, we imagine, spend their
time gazing at the bright side of life through rose-colored glasses, sipping
glasses half-full of good cheer.
But the science suggests that optimism is best understood not as
an unchanging attitude but as a pattern of responses — which taken together
dictate how we view our prospects. Being optimistic is more complicated than
blithely thinking, “Everything will turn out fine.”
Optimism and pessimism, it turns out, are all about the stories
we tell ourselves after both our successes and our failures.
So ask yourself this: What kind of stories have you told
yourself over the last few years — a stretch of time that even the most
practiced optimist may have found challenging?
Because, as it turns out, those stories matter. And
psychologists have devised questions that can help us understand why.
A challengeIn 2023, optimism can feel like a challenge. The pandemic is
three years old and the planet’s climate future seems increasingly in crisis,
to name just two outsized concerns. If ever there were a time to be pessimistic
about optimism, it would seem to be right now.
Sure enough, a 2022 Gallup Poll found that the number of
Americans who believe the next generation will enjoy a higher standard of
living than their parents has fallen by 18% since 2019. That dramatic shift is
understandable. But it doesn’t have to be permanent.
When Dr Martin Seligman was a young man on the verge of
adulthood, at the dawn of the 1960s, he was a committed pessimist. “I toyed
with writing about death and dying, and I wore black much of the time,”
Seligman wrote in his autobiography, “The Hope Circuit”. “I was morbidly
introspective and through freshman year kept a handwritten journal of dark
thoughts.”
Seligman had his reasons. His father, after a series of strokes,
had become paralyzed and depressed, never recovering either physically or
emotionally. On scholarship at a private military academy where he did not fit
in easily with his affluent classmates, Seligman had been denied promotions and
prizes, despite being at the top of his high-school class.
At 18, Seligman would have seemed an unlikely character to
become a future founder of the field known as positive psychology.
But he found his place and his people at Princeton University,
he writes, and later settled into graduate research in psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Seligman distinguished himself for his work on the
phenomenon of learned helplessness: the idea, internalized to varying degrees
by some of us, that nothing we do matters and so there is no point in trying.
In other words — the opposite of optimism.
Optimism and pessimism, it turns out, are all about the stories we tell ourselves after both our successes and our failures.
Seligman and other researchers examined this phenomenon through
a series of experiments, such as exposing lab animals or human subjects to
adverse conditions like a mild shock or an irritating noise. Sometimes they
would provide a mechanism for the subjects to make the irritant stop; in other
cases, there was no way for the subject to change their situation. The aim was
to see if people could either be taught to seek a solution or persuaded to give
up trying.
But there was a group, Seligman found, that kept persistently
trying to improve their circumstances, long after the other study subjects had
quit. Seligman became fascinated by these subjects — who, it turned out, skewed
more heavily optimistic when their attitudes were tested.
So Seligman decided to study them instead.
In the nearly 40 years since, he and his colleagues have
examined the optimists among us: what makes us optimistic, what optimism looks
like and the extent to which optimism can be learned. Now 80, he is still
teaching, studying and publishing about the benefits of optimistic thinking —
and advancing our understanding of how optimism works.
Beyond the most basic evolutionary struggles, we know that, on
the whole, optimism is good for us. Optimists tend to live longer, be more
successful professionally and be less likely to experience depression and other
illnesses.
When crises occur, Seligman’s research shows, optimism can even
offer some protection against the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder, or
PTSD.
“The first day that you join the United States Army, you take a
100-item test that we devised,” Seligman explained. “It asks you about
optimism, pessimism, and about catastrophization,” an extreme form of pessimism
that involves irrational anxiety over the worst possible outcome — for example,
if your spouse does not text you right back after work and you spiral into visions
of a car accident or a funeral.
Seligman’s team followed a cohort of nearly 80,000 American
soldiers who entered the military, completed the test and then deployed to Iraq
or Afghanistan for active duty between 2009 and 2013. (The results of the study
were published in a 2019 paper in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.)
“Five percent of the force is diagnosed with PTSD,” said
Seligman, “and we asked, could you predict it? And the answer was, robustly,
yes.” Seligman identified two risk factors for PTSD. One is severe combat and
the other, he said, “is being in the worst quartile of pessimists.”
Can pessimism ever be a good thing?“Clearly it’s got utility because there is so much of it,” he
said. But he has only found one profession of those he’s examined (he has not
studied journalism; I asked) where it seems to be a clear-cut advantage.
“Lawyers call it prudence,” he said. “But it’s basically trying
to protect your client against all these awful unlikely things that could
occur.”
In a study of a University of Virginia law school cohort, the
pessimists were more likely to land on the law review and ultimately more
likely to find better jobs. But, Seligman noted, lawyers also have higher than
average rates of divorce, depression and suicide.
Always seeing the worst-case scenario, he explained, can be an
advantage under the right circumstances, but it can also come at a cost.
Personally, I have been feeling more pessimistic lately.
Seligman’s description of what we tell ourselves when we catastrophize — “when
bad things happen to me, everything unravels” — felt uncomfortably familiar to
me.
So it was helpful to speak to Seligman and Fox and to recognize
these patterns in my own thoughts — to see myself generalizing from the
negative events in my world and ignoring or flinging caveats at the positives
in my life. I recognized that these thought patterns are tangible and specific.
So it feels like something I can address.
Seligman confirmed that hunch. We can, with some effort, alter
our balance of optimistic and pessimistic thinking.
“It’s now a robust, replicated finding that you can teach people
to, for example, argue against their most catastrophic thoughts with reasonable
evidence and move pessimism into optimism,” he said.
Several recent meta-analyses, which crunched data from dozens of
studies using tens of thousands of study subjects, have examined the research
on counseling techniques known as positive psychology interventions, programs
that help us reframe the stories we tell ourselves. These meta-analyses found
that the interventions were consistently beneficial.
“So there’s a technology,” said Seligman, “and it works.”
Whether you’re inclined toward optimism or pessimism, you have
some control over your outlook. And that’s something to be optimistic about.
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